Eggcitement in London...

Yesterday we did the final checkout and left our flat in London. Pretty sad to be leaving, it was a lovely place to live but there are new adventures to have elsewhere! Anyhow, before cleaning and fixing on Sunday we spent some time wandering around London searching for these:

Moonbow by Richard Bull (eggciting, huh?)

Some of you will remember the wonderful Elephant Parade that happened in London in 2010 where over 250 colourful, beautiful elephants were place all over the capital and thousands of people (including yours truly) enjoyed a couple of months of fun trying to find them all whilst raising money to help save endangered Asian elephants. Well, now the lovely people over at Elephant Family have joined forces with Action For Children to give us something else to hunt for: Easter Eggs! At the end of lent, all the eggs will be auctioned off and the money will go directly to the two charities.

Having been an avid elephant collector, I obviously had to take on the challenge of finding the eggs and so far, we have found 94 of these wonderful creations. I even spent a couple of hours looking for them yesterday with an enormous Ikea bag full of the cleaning supplies we'd been using on Sunday. Some may think I'm a little crazy (and my shoulder would agree...) but I just call it dedication!

Not only does joining the egg hunt give you a great way to spend time, it also has two other MAJOR benefits. One thing that people say about London, and big cities in general, is that they are impersonal and, for the most part, people don't talk to each other. Enter the eggs! When you find fellow hunters, you compare notes, chat about your routes, share what your favourite eggs have been and generally get chatting to some very interesting people who you might never have spoken to otherwise. It's wonderful. The other main advantage, I reckon, is that you get a huge amount of exercise walking around searching and get to see all sorts of nooks and crannies of London that you miss on the regular tourist or commuter routes (that was two more benefits wasn't it...? Well, even more reason to start!)

Pretty Polly by Karen Hollis (eggceptional!)

I'm finding that there's an added quizzical element to the eggs: some of them have been painted by artists who also painted Elephants and I find myself (with my still near-encyclopedic knowledge of the Elephants, 2 years on...ahem) getting especially excited when I find an egg that matches a particular elephant...like the one on the left here, which was painted as the same artist who created Just Joey! Other eggs have been found with cries of 'Bramble!' or 'No More Plundering!' (which kind of also sounds like a message to any would-be egg destroyers...)  or 'The Happy End of Nature!'. The last one was, conveniently, also the name of the egg...

Anyhow, all this eggcitement (you thought the egg puns were going to be limited to captions didn't you...well more fool you, you know I like a good pun!) has reminded me of my yearly egg-painting tradition, which is something I've done at Easter since I was little. I'll admit that some years, work has got in the way and egg-painting had gone by the wayside...but this year I have been inspired early on and am determined to have my own hand-painted miniature egg hunt! And, it true Blue Peter here's-one-I-made-earlier style, I've found a few of the eggs I've painted in the past to show you (I mean for you to eggsamine...):

I have eggscavated them from the cupboard...

I'm thinking that I might have a go at making some of the Big Egg Hunt eggs in miniature...

So, if you're in London or heading down there or like searching for things so much that you'll go there just for that take a look at this website, put on some sturdy shoes, find a buddy (or several!) and get hunting! It'll be eggstraordinary! (ok, ok, I'll stop...there's no need to get eggasperated with me...)